| It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet. An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds. They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don’t have any meaning by themselves. A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them all precisely. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. What exactly is a Chinese character?Here is one way to look at it: take the English word “unexpected” for example.Let’s split it into smaller units of meaning: [UN]-[EXPECT]-[ED]. Chinese characters are like those 3 parts. In Chinese, UN would be a character, EXPECT would be another, and ED would be yet another. The word “unexpected” would then be a 3-character word. Let’s take an actual Chinese word as example and see how this works: 昨天 (zuó tiān) => yesterday We have 2 characters here: 昨 (zuó) + 天 (tiān). Let’s imagine we can split it in English the same way: [YESTER] + [DAY]. As in English, the second character 天 (tiān), means day, and as in English, the first one is not a word if taken alone. But it is sufficiently unique to give the whole word its meaning. Now, let’s invent a word in English and Chinese at the same time: 昨月 (zuó yuè) => yestermonth You can guess what I mean with this word, and a Chinese person would probably guess what I mean too, even if those words don’t actually exist. This is to show that yester and 昨 (zuó) carry a meaning of their own, even if they are not words. I hope this gives you a sense of what Chinese characters are and how they differ from words and letters. Now there are a few differences between Chinese characters and English morphemes (a morpheme is what those parts like yester, day, un, expect, ed would be called by a linguist). When I see 天 (tiān), I see a small icon which represents a person extending his arms under the sky. I see it this way, because that’s how it has been explained to me, and with a bit of imagination, it makes sense. The first meaning of 天 (tiān) is “sky” and by extension “day”. So, Chinese characters are in a way, like small abstract pictures. And that’s an important difference with English morphemes. Another difference is that English morphemes change to fit the words they contribute to. The word “morpheme” is an indication of this phenomenon. For example “day” becomes “dai” in the word “daily”. There are many words in English for which it is hard to find the morphemes, because they blend together. In addition, there are grammar rules like conjugation that further transform words so that their morphemes are not quite visible. In Chinese, there is no conjugation, and the morphemes never blend in with their surrounding. Instead, words are made by composing characters like you would compose Lego bricks. An other example … 共产主义 (gòng chǎn zhǔ yì) => communism It’s interesting because you can analyze it at multiple levels. You can take it as a whole word, which means “communism”. You can split it in 2: 共产 (gòng chǎn) + 主义 (zhǔ yì): communist + ideology. You can split it in 4: 共 (gòng) + 产 (chǎn) + 主 (zhǔ) + 义 (yì): shared + production + main + meaning |
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